Unless otherwise indicated herein, the approaches described in this section are not prior art to the claims in this application and are not admitted to be prior art by inclusion in this section.
Many factors may lead to congestion in wireless networks including excessive traffic bursting, overbooking, rerouting, ingress policing, and more. Such congestion may increase stress on both bandwidth and buffering which in turn may cause delays and increased data loss that may lead to link dropping. Furthermore, wireless networks are increasingly required to support mobile devices having non-telephonic functionality, such as mobile telephones equipped with Global Positioning System (GPS) functionality, electronic book readers, gaming consoles, and the like. Many of these devices (such as GPS trackers in particular) attempt to maintain network connections for large fractions of the time while sending relatively little data and may be expected to place increased bandwidth demands on wireless networks.
Network Connection Admission Control (CAC) policies, such as those defined by ITU-T recommendation I.371, for example, typically use calculations of effective bandwidth based on variables such as Peak Cell Rate (PCR), Sustainable Cell Rate (SCR), and Maximum Burst Size (MBS). Monitoring of such variables may be used to trade off service quality and/or admission to meet Quality of Service (QoS) targets, such as Cell Loss Ratios (CLR) or other values, which maintain a statistical estimate of the frequency of dropped connections due to over demand conditions. Typical CAC policies implement a metric such as CLR (proportional to the ratio of cell data lost to cell data received) and a target for each level of service. For example, the TM 4.0 standard defines five service categories having a range of CLR target values.
While typical network CAC policies restrict admission to a network or adjust service levels when participant conditions induce or are expected to induce Quality of Service (QoS) losses, such as CLR violations, it may be useful to have a low-impact control policy to drop less desirable connections before random traffic levels result in connection drops.